ovh-ipxe-customer-script VS upx

Alpine is one of the unsung heroes of the container world. It's insane how much value Natanael Copa has shepherded over the years (decades?). Recently came upon an interview with him and it was the first time I saw the creator behind Alpine Linux[0].

Thank you for those links, I am about to gobble up those blog posts -- I recently went on a benchmarking kick[1] and diskless alpine instantly struck me as the perfect server setup. ECC memory + running from ram would give me full use (to put in RAID/whatever else) of the NVMe drives, it's something I'm going to try out as soon as I get a chance to.

I am so interested in the infrastructure space, I know exactly two hosting providers that will give me PXE level access (so I could use something like tinkerbell[2]):

- OVH [3][4]

- Vultr[5]

- LeaseWeb[6]

Unfortunately my personal favorite hosting provider, Hetzner[7] (I fell in love the moment I came across the robot marketplace) does not offer it yet, though I've automated going through their rescue system at this point so it's OK.

[0]: https://www.tfir.io/meet-the-creator-of-alpine-linux-natanae...

[1]: https://vadosware.io/post/k8s-storage-provider-benchmarks-ro...

[2]: https://docs.tinkerbell.org/

[3]: https://github.com/gmasse/ovh-ipxe-customer-script

[4]: https://geekgonecrazy.com/2020/09/07/tinkerbell-or-ipxe-boot...

[5]: https://www.vultr.com/docs/ipxe-boot-feature

[6]: https://kb.leaseweb.com/products/dedicated-server/installing...

[7]: https://www.hetzner.com

According to this source:

Following optimization, tools like UPX can compress the resulting binary, significantly reducing file size. This compression is invaluable for resource-constrained environments but adds a decompression step during binary execution.

I have been using UPX but I'm quite sure if there's something out there that offers better compression.

Ah that's nice, long ago I used parchment.js to load a inform7 created z5 file on my website. You could try to compress your executable with upx https://upx.github.io/

In this process, the given packer tool embeds a natively compiled PE into another executable that contains the information needed to unpack the original content and execute it. Perhaps the most well known packer, which is not even for malicious purposes, is Golang's UPX package.

Rewrite in C#, and use an obfuscator on the DLL. You can also write some parts in C++ as many variable and function names are forgotten when compiling. You should also encrypt the PCK, and see if you can embed it. If it's embedded, you can make it more annoying to deal with by packing it with https://upx.github.io/

Another good example of false positives like this would be binaries that are compressed with UPX - the way it works is apparently very similar to how stub-loader malware operates and signature detection tools will flag it as malicious.

This will optimise the release binary to be as small as possible. Additionally with upx we can create really small docker image !

Then I compressed it with upx, cp small.exe smallUpx.exe && upx --brute smallUpx.exe, got a 10752 bytes executable, half the size, but still pretty large